Thinkstank

Cookbook by known Dude associate. Dedication is to...

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 08:08:57 -0800

Cookbook by known Dude associate. Dedication is to “Donny, who like so many young men of his generation died before his time.”

Ordering Dim Sum.

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 10:35:43 -0800

Ordering Dim Sum.

Adjustable Golden Shower Head

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 11:33:49 -0800

Specialty accessory for watersports enthusiasts. Strap that fellow on over the old faucet, then turn the head (hey, gently now) to set it to e.g. “mist”, “jet”, “massage”, “flower pot”…

LARP Trek. Webcomic in which the crew of the Enterprise cope...

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 08:54:00 -0800

LARP Trek. Webcomic in which the crew of the Enterprise cope with a broken holodeck by playing something Geordi dug up: an “old-school role-playing game”.

Their first campaign: a space station adventured called Deep Space Nine.

This is a for-real one. The main site is larptrek.com and if you’re more into the tumblrs you can follow larptrek.tumblr.com as well.

Alice's Restaurant as gritty crime drama

Thu, 22 Nov 2012 13:46:15 -0800

Trailer for film that is based on, but wildly misunderstands and misinterprets, the text of Arlo Guthrie’s classic Thanksgiving tune, Alice’s Restaurant.

Starring Ryan Gosling as Arlo, Gary Busey as Officer Obie, and Christina Hendricks as Alice.

Read the full treatment right over here.

Actual Horses, the restaurant

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 09:28:24 -0700

A family-friendly American dining restaurant franchise, with a gimmick: the restaurant contains actual horses.

Have a hamburger and a milkshake and also there’s an actual horse there!

Want an onion popper appetizer? No problem; also, an actual horse is standing nearby!

It’s your birthday? They’ll bring you out a cupcake with a candle in it, and also a waiter will put peanut butter on an actual horse’s gums so that it tries to lick it off and looks like its talking, and then someone will stand behind the horse and sing happy birthday and it’ll be like the horse is singing happy birthday to you for at least as long as the peanut butter lasts.

Dance Dance Resident Evil

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:06:50 -0700

Dance-pad adaptation of Capcom zombie franchise.

Step your way through the directional-arrow-tiled halls of spooky Spencer Mansion! Do a quick left-right-up-down eighth-note pattern to pick up the green herb! Nail five double hops in a row to dodge Wesker’s attack in the Umbrella Corporation’s top secret dance labs!

Play as any of several Resident Evil protagonists. Chris Redfield can outskank any bro on the block; Ada Wong gets a tango bonus in her red dress; Jill Valentine is the master of pop-and-locking. A special “zombie dog” bonus mode encourages you to play on all fours, and also to leap through windows constantly.

DDRE is a lot like Typing of the Dead except with rhythm-game dancing instead of survival horror console-style zombiebothering rather than typing instead of arcade-style lightgun zombie railshooting, and also Resident Evil rather than House of the Dead. So basically as different from Typing of the Dead as a game could be while still being appallingly similar in both source material genre and subversive edutainment intent.

Payphone Finder

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 12:58:41 -0700

iPhone app. Uses your location and mapping API to direct you to the nearest payphone, for when you really need to make a phone call.

Fecal Fairy Tales

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:12:21 -0800

Publishing venture. Classic fairy tales rewritten to keep kids interested by pandering to the childhood love of potty humor. Story text also supplemented to emphasize a pro-potty-training moral.

Launch titles include:

Little Red Riding Pooed 
Three Little Logs
 Goldiplops 
Cinderrhea 
Seeping Booty 
The Princess and the Poo 
Snow White and the Seven Flushes
 Poops in Boots 
The Goose That Laid the Brown Eggs
 Peter and the Toilet
 The Ugly Dungling
Rapoonzel
 Hansel & Two-ply 
Jack and the Brownstalk 
The Pied Pooper
 Stone Poop
 Rumplestipation

Stories narrated by “Prince Charmin”.

Totally Totally Chatmonster

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 15:16:37 -0800

Japanese arcade dancer in which you engage in “competiversation” with various NPC opponents—a salaryman on the Tokyo subway, a geisha, a schoolgirl, Iron Chef Morimoto, etc.—by stepping on the correct dance pad arrows to fire off the words that construct an effective riposte to their latest rhetorical gambit.

Two players can play head-to-head, using a pair of dance pads to softshoe simplified discussions of a variety of topics. This will replace texting as the primary form of communication between many Japanese teens.

Further, TTC conversations will be used as a means of plain-sight encrypting communications to stymie nosey adults: the code can be employed in person through basic footwork, or deployed over traditional text chat media by typing sequences of <, >, v and ^ characters that can be decoded as footsteps by a conversant recipient.

Mapstalgia

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 16:57:55 -0800

Mapstalgia!

Tumblr blog collecting drawings, done only from memory, of maps of video game worlds and levels and such.

I liked this idea enough that I made it happen today, so go check out Mapstalgia.

And draw up a video game map and submit it while you’re at it.

Mapstalgia!

Franklin Delano Groversbelt. No further comment at this time.

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:56:07 -0800

Franklin Delano Groversbelt.

No further comment at this time.

Secret Sontag Gift Exchange

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:38:36 -0800

Holiday ritual in which each participant draws the name of another participant out of a hat and then sends them an anonymous greeting card featuring a quote by essayist Susan Sontag and probably some sort of holiday greeting while you’re at it.

Some ideas to get you started:

National Novel Plagiarism Month

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 07:15:00 -0800

Remix culture variation on the traditional National Novel Writing Month: you have one month to rewrite, from memory and without any references, a novel that you have previously read.

UPDATE 12/14/11: RYAN NORTH I AM GIVING YOU A DIRTY LOOK RIGHT NOW

The Square Foot: a daily photoblog of Portland, one literal...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 09:59:00 -0800

The Square Foot: a daily photoblog of Portland, one literal square foot at a time.

Using a camera and a one-foot-by-one-foot frame to grab little bits of the city within the bounds of a fixed constraint.

I haven’t been doing photography consistently enough, so this one’s actually happening for real. Go check out thesquarefoot.tumblr.com.

Monogrammed mustaches

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 16:05:00 -0800

Ironic bougie hipster facial hair styling option: a nice pair of calligraphic initials poised the side of one’s upper lip.

Could be accomplished a few different ways:

1. Dyeing/bleaching monogram into existing facial hair.

2. Using holding product and some sort of crimping process to rearrange existing facial hair to bear an imprinted monogram as positive and negative space in the mustache.

3. Taking lock of head hair and pressing/fixing it into a bit of sturdy monogram hair art plaque; cutting “shelf” into mustache to accommodate plaque; using a few mustache hairs to tie plaque into place on shelf. More work but probably the most stable long-term solution.

4. Fake plastic monogrammed mustache to wear with fake Groucho-style nose-and-glasses-and-eyebrows glasses, except the mustache isn’t attached to rest so you can whip off the glasses with a flourish and produce double takes.

5. Body mod special: shave existing mustache, use a soldering iron to brand monogram into actual upper lip, let hair grow back in all the places that you haven’t permanently destroyed your hair follicles.

Tetris as free-to-play game

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 09:24:00 -0800

Microtransaction-funded free Tetris app for iPhone.

Play like normal Tetris except the default game only comes with the s and z pieces, for an easy learning experience and some challenging puzzling action.

But! For just a little bit of cash, you can enhance your game experience with these optional add-on features:

- Additional kinds of tetromino cost $1 each for square, L, T and J. There’s also a really powerful long skinny | piece available for $2 if you really want to step up your game.

- Rotating isn’t strictly necessary but it adds a lot of depth to game and it’s a bargain at $2. Highly recommended to enthusiasts.

- Tired of waiting for pieces to fall all the way to the bottom when it’s a gimme move? $3 gets you “Time Warp”, a feature that let’s you hold the down arrow to move a piece toward the bottom much faster. Frenetic Tetris action!

- Stay one step ahead with “Clairvoyance”, a $5 game-changer that lets you see the next piece before it falls.

- For advanced players looking for more of a marathon than a sprint, $8 gets you “Nuke It From Orbit”, a special feature that will remove an entire row from the game board if you manage to fill all ten squares with tetromino matter. With the nuclear option, it’s like a whole new game!

Trillbocop

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 08:07:57 -0800

What If? style cross-over comic book miniseries combining Robocop and Deep Space Nine:

As the result of both gang warfare in early 21st century Detroit and a space-time anomaly in the Gamma Quadrant in the 24th C, mortally wounded cop Alex Murphy is taken to the same secret government hospital as dying, time-displaced Starfleet officer Jadzia Dax.

Murphy’s body is rebuilt using robotic parts thanks to future-tech guidance from Jazdia, in exchange for which help she asks that her Dax symbiote be transplanted into Murphy to keep it safely hosted until Earth develops warp technology and can reunite it with the Trill people.

Trillbocop, six and a half feet of cybernetic freckles, proceeds to clean up the streets and corporate boardrooms of Old Detroit, while Alex Dax engages in a dual struggles to find some continuity of identity to both the cop’s old family and work life and the old symbiote’s violent separation from his previous host and his introduction to an unfamiliar Human physiology.

Cameo by android Starfleet officer Data, who gets in a wrestling match with ED-209.

displacedgroceries.tumblr.com Blog dedicated to photo...

Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:38:41 -0800

displacedgroceries.tumblr.com

Blog dedicated to photo documentation and first person accounts of items taken off the shelf at a grocery store or Costco or whatever and then, on second thought, abandoned again on a random, incorrect shelf.

A Peever's Internet Companion

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 09:26:03 -0800

Greasemonkey script or some other sort of browser plug-in or add-on. Identifies and highlights potential peeve-bait (from “irregardless” to sentence-terminal prepositions) on every page you visit, underlining questionable or contentious words and phrases with tooltips explaining the usage issues involved, with references to reliable usage manuals.